In April, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) proposed a range of new rules intended to help...

IDS to be called to account for DWP use of statistics

Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, is to be called in front of the Work and Pensions Select Committee in June over the misuse by the department of government statistics. This follows the rebuke from the official statistics watchdog for claiming that the benefits cap is pushing people to find paid work.

The select committee’s decision to ‘examine the way the DWP releases benefit statistics to the media’ follows a petition to the committee, signed by 96,666 people, calling for the committee to ‘hold IDS to account for his use of statistics on welfare’. Jayne Linney, who set up the petition on Change.org commented: ‘By starting this petition we’ve shown that everyone has the tools to call politicians out if they try to make things up. They can’t get away with spinning statistics any longer.

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PSE:UK is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052.